2. LaRouche Testifies on his Case

The following is the opening statement made by Lyndon LaRouche at
independent hearings convened by the Schiller Institute in late August 1995. The
hearings heard testimony on the subject of misconduct at the U.S. Department of
Justice, in four areas: the Frühmenschen prosecutions of black elected
officials; the Demjanjuk case; the LaRouche case; and the case of Kurt Waldheim.
The hearings were chaired by prominent Alabama attorney J.L. Chestnut, and
former U.S. Congressman from South Carolina James Mann.

James Mann:

If anyone needs an introduction to the next presenter, I suggest you see
him after the meeting. We're delighted to have Lyndon LaRouche.

Lyndon LaRouche:

Just for the record, I'll state a few facts which bear upon the
circumstances in which certain events befell me.

I was born in Sept. 8, 1922, in Rochester, New Hampshire, lived there for
the first 10 years of my life, lived for the next 22 years of my life in Lynn,
Mass., except for service overseas. I moved to New York City, where I lived
until July of 1983, and, since that time, except for a period of incarceration,
I have been a resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I attended university a couple of times during the course before the war or
at the beginning of the war, and after it; and then had a career in management
consulting, which lasted until about 1972, tapered off, sort of.

My most notable professional achievement was developed during the years
1948-1952, in certain discoveries of a fundamental scientific nature in respect
to economics, and my professional qualifications are essentially derived from
that.

In the course of time, in 1964, approximately, I was persuaded that things
were being done to change the United States, which, from my view, were the worst
possible disaster that could befall this nation. And thus, while I had given up
any hope of political improvement in this country before then, to speak of, I
felt I had to do something. So I became involved part time, from 1966 through
1973, in teaching a one-semester course on economics, largely on the graduate
level, at a number of campus locations, chiefly in New York City, but also in
Pennsylvania.

In the course of this, a number of these students who participated in these
classes, became associated with me, and, out of this association, came the birth
of a nascent political organization, as much a philosophical organization as
political. Our central commitment was Third World issues and related issues,
that is, that economic justice for what is called the Third World is essential
for a just society for all nations. I became particularly attached to this,
during military service overseas in India, where I saw what colonialism does to
people, and I was persuaded at the time, as I believe a majority of the people
who were in service with me, that we were coming to the end of a war which we
had not foreseen but which we had been obliged to fight, and that if we allowed
the circumstances that I saw to prevail, in the Third World, we would bring upon
ourselves some kind of disaster, either war or something comparable down the
line.

And that was essentially our commitment as an association.

We became rather unpopular with a number of institutions, including McGeorge
Bundy's Ford Foundation. About 1969, we made a mess of a few projects he was
funding, by exposing them. And we also became unpopular with the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, perhaps at the behest of McGeorge Bundy.

In 1973, according to a document later issued under the Freedom of
Information Act by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New York Office of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting at all times under supervision of
Washington headquarters, hatched a plot to have me eliminated, or to induce the
Communist Party U.S.A., that my elimination would solve a number of their
problems. There actually {was} an abortive attempt on me during that period. I
knew the FBI had been involved. I couldn't prove it then, but I knew it, and,
later, a document appeared showing that.

From that point on, during the 1970s, until the end of COINTELPRO, we were
constantly beset by the FBI. Our main weapon against the FBI was jokes. We used
to make some jokes about the FBI, which we would pass around, to try to persuade
them to keep off our tail, but they kept coming, and all kinds of harassment.

Then, in 1982, there was a new development. I sensed it happening, but I
received the documents later, the events which led to my, what I would call, a
fraudulently obtained indictment and conviction and incarceration.

It started, according to the record, and I had some sensibility this was
going on at the time, with Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (with
whom no love was lost between us). Kissinger went to William Webster and others,
soliciting an FBI or other government operation against me and my associates.
This led, as the record later showed, to a decision by Henry Kissinger's friends
on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, recommending an
operation against me and my associates. This was adopted during the same month
of January by Judge Webster, then Director of the FBI, who passed the
implementation of this instruction along to his subordinate, Oliver ``Buck''
Revell, recently retired from the FBI, I believe.

The first inkling I had of this, was in about April of 1983, at which time a
New York banker, John Train, who is very intelligence-witting, shall we say,
from the private bank of Smith and Train in New York City, held a salon at which
various government agents, private individuals, the Anti-Defamation League, for
example, and also NBC-TV News, the {Reader's Digest,} the {Wall Street Journal}
and others, were represented.

The purpose was to coordinate an array of libels, a menu of libels, which
would be commonly used by the news media, in an attempt to defame me, and
hopefully, from their standpoint, to lead to criminal action against me and my
associates.

In January of 1984, this attack came into the open, launched by NBC-TV,
which had been a participant in this salon of Train's, which launched the
pattern, which was the pattern of coverage {by all U.S. news media,} major news
media, and many minor news media. From the period of the end of January 1984,
through the end of 1988, I saw no case of any significant coverage of me or
mention of me, in the U.S. print media, particularly the major print media, the
Associated Press, in particular, which was an active part of the prosecution, in
fact, or in the national television media, network media especially; not a
single mention of me {which did not conform to the menu of libels concocted by
this salon} which had been established under John Train as part of this
operation.

This salon, including the Anti-Defamation League, NBC-TV, others, the
Associated Press, {actively collaborated,} beginning sometime in 1984, with
forces inside the government which were determined to have a criminal
prosecution against me and my associates. The criminal prosecution was launched
at about the time of the 1984 presidential election, in October-November 1984.
And from that point on, it was a continued escalation, until a Federal case in
Boston led to a mistrial, occasioned largely by government misconduct in the
case, in May of 1988.

Following that, on or about October 14 in Virginia, a new prosecution was
opened up, and that led to my conviction in December of 1988, and my sentencing,
for 15 years, in January 1989. I believe Mr. Anderson has described the nature
of the case. And that resulted in five years of service in Federal prison, from
which I'm now released on parole.

The motivations of the case against us, I think, are, in part, obvious,
perhaps partly not.

In 1982-83, there were two things which greatly excited my enemies. Number
one, I had been involved, in 1982, in presenting a proposal which was based on
my forecast in the spring of 1982, that a major debt crisis would break out in
South America, Central America, and the expectation that Mexico would be the
nation that would have a debt crisis. I'd been involved with many of these
countries and personalities in them, in projecting alternatives to this kind of
inequitable system, where the ``colonial nation'' had been replaced by the term
``debtor nation.'' And the debt of South America, Central America was largely
illegitimate, that is, it was a debt which had not been incurred for value
received, but had been done under special monetary conditions, under the
so-called floating exchange rate system, where bankers would come to a country,
the IMF in particular, would say, ``We just wrote down the value of the
currency; we're now going to re-fund your financing of your foreign debt, which
you can no longer pay on the same basis as before.''

So I proposed, that the debt crisis be used as the occasion for united
action by a number of governments of South and Central American countries, to
force a reform in the international debt relations, and to force a reform within
international monetary relations. This report was entitled ``Operation Juàrez,''
largely because of the relationship of President Lincoln to Mexico during the
time that Lincoln was President, with the idea that it was in the interest of
the United States to accept and sponsor such a reform, to assist these countries
in the freedom to resume development of the type which they had desired.

This report was published in August of 1982, ironically a few weeks before
the eruption of the great Mexico debt crisis of '82, and was presented also to
the U.S. government and the National Security Council, for the President's
information at that time. There was some effort, on the part of the President of
Mexico, to implement my proposal in the initial period of the debt crisis. He
had, at that time, some support from the President of Brazil and the government
of Argentina. But under pressure from the United States, the government of
Brazil and Argentina capitulated, and President José Lopez Portillo, the
President of Mexico, was left, shall we say, ``hanging out to dry.''

As a result, in October of 1982, he capitulated to the terms which were
delivered to his government and people around him, by people such as Henry A.
Kissinger, who made a trip to Mexico at that time, to attempt to intimidate the
Mexicans to submitting to these new terms. This was one issue between me and
Kissinger, and his friends.

The second issue was, that sometime about December of 1981, a representative
of the U.S. government approached me, and had asked me if I would be willing to
set up an exploratory back-channel discussion with the Soviet government,
because the Soviet government wanted, according to them, an additional channel
to discuss things. And I said I didn't reject the idea, I said, but I have an
idea on this question of nuclear missiles. It was becoming increasingly
dangerous, forward-basing, more precise missiles, electromagnetic pulse, we're
getting toward a first strike, it would be very useful to discuss what I
proposed in my 1980 election campaign, with the Soviet government, to see if
they'd be interested in discussing such a proposal. This might prove a
profitable exploratory discussion.

And so, from February of 1982, through February of 1983, I did conduct such
back-channel discussions with representatives of the Soviet government in
Washington, D.C. Those were somewhat fruitful, but ultimately abortive.
Kissinger and others became aware of this discussion, during the summer of 1982,
and their circles were very much opposed to that. The general view was
expressed, that I was getting ``too big for my britches,'' and I had to be dealt
with: on the question of debt, which some of these people were concerned about,
and on this question of strategic missile defense, where I had this proposal,
which the President adopted, at least initially, in the form of what became
known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. And when the Strategic Defense
Initiative was announced by the President on March 23, 1983, there were a lot of
people out for my scalp.

Those are the at least contributing factors, in what happened to me. But
they may not be all. There probably are others, as well.

What I find significant, and have found significant in this case, is that
the problem here, even though Kissinger may have been, largely, the author or
the agent of the office in bringing about what I would characterize as my
fraudulent indictment and conviction, the problem here is that, and I saw this,
being in prison: People would come to me with their paperwork, and talk to me
about their cases, prisoners, which made a stronger impression on me on this
question.

We have, in my view, a system of injustice whose center is within the
Department of Justice, especially the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department
of Justice. The problem lies not with one administration or another, though one
administration or another may act more positively or more negatively. You have
{permanent} civil service employees, like Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jack
Keeney and Mark Richard, who are coordinators of a nest of institutions in the
Criminal Division, which show up {repeatedly} as leading or key associates of
every legal atrocity which I've seen.

This is the case with the so-called {Frühmenschen} operation, which is
largely an FBI operation, but which cannot run without the assistance and
cooperation of these people. The Demjanjuk case, which is outstanding, of a man
who, according to the Sixth Circuit, a man who the Justice Department {knew to
be innocent of the charges they were making against him at the time they made
the charges}; and yet, Mark Richard and Jack Keeney and so forth, proceeded with
that case. {An attempt to secure the execution of this man in Israel, over the
objections of the Israeli government,} for an OSI operation which was set into
place by Henry Kissinger some years before. You have the Weaver case: the same
thing. The much-celebrated Waco case: the same complex of injustice.

We have an out-of-control Justice Department, in my view, where the rot is
not in the appointees, as much as it is in the permanent bureaucracy. We have a
permanent sickness, in the permanent bureaucracy of part of our government.

In my case, when the time came that somebody wanted {me} out of the way,
they were able to rely upon that permanent injustice in the permanent
bureaucracy of government, to do the job. As in the {Frühmenschen} case,
the Weaver case, the Waco case, the case of Waldheim, the case of Demjanjuk, and
other cases. Always there's that agency inside the Justice Department, which
works for contract, like a hitman, when somebody with the right credentials and
passwords walks in, and says, ``we want to get this group of people,'' or ``we
want to get this person.''

My case may be, as Ramsey Clark described it, the most extensive and the
highest level of these cases, in terms of the duration and scope of the
operation. It came to involve the Soviet government, it came to involve the East
German Stasi intelligence service, it involved collaboration between the
Department of Justice and the Stasi in the case of Palme's murder. It involved
direct collaboration with, as I said, the Soviet government.

The Soviet press, particularly from about, off and on, from Andropov,
beginning 1984, and then when Gorbachov came in again, '85-'86, into '88; the
Soviet press vilification of me, in collaboration with the same line as the U.S.
press, exceeded that of anything, since Stalin's time, in the Soviet press,
against any private individual, in history. And it was part of the same
operation.

So my case is important, in the sense it's more extensive, it's more
deep-going, long-going. But when it came to getting {me,} it was the {same
apparatus,} that, I find, was used in these other cases. And until we remove,
from our system of government, a rotten, permanent bureaucracy which acts like
contract assassins, using the authority of the justice system to perpetrate
assassination, this country is not free, nor is anyone in it.

My general impression, from being in prison and meeting these fellows; and I
know these fellows, you know. You get in prison and you get my experience, you
{know} the people you're with. Well, they're {all} perpetrators, most of them. A
few cases are really innocent; framed up. But most of them were drug cases or
something else, and you knew they were in the group of people they're accused of
being in.

But when I saw the paperwork, I was astonished. I saw totally
counterproductive sentences. I saw a shameful proceeding. Our Federal court
system, our Federal criminal justice system is out of control. And it appears to
me, that this {nest} around Mark Richard and Jack Keeney and others, in the
permanent bureaucracy of the Justice Department, if they're not the heart of the
problem, they're close enough to it, that if you pull out that cancer, you may
find out where the next one is.